A hasty trip by Vice-President Joe Biden to visit Senator Elizabeth Warren this past weekend has sparked new hope for Warren supporters that she will yet be a national candidate in 2016. Could Biden be planning a run for the presidency , and sounding out the Massachusetts senator for his veep slot?

The National Review went so far as to call a Biden-Warren ticket the Democrats’ “Plan B”, should the Hillary Clinton campaign flounder.

The Biden-Warren meeting was given over to economic policy and did not particularly focus on the 2016 campaign, according to CNN , which broke the news.

Biden, however, rearranged his schedule to make the meeting happen, traveling on Saturday from his home in Delaware back to Washington at the “last-minute”, according to an unnamed White House source quoted in the Washington Post .

As perhaps the country’s most credible critic of criminal activity in the financial sector, Warren is a star on the left who could potentially confer an influential endorsement on any Democractic presidential candidate. Clinton invited Warren to meet her one-on-one at her Washington home last December.

Biden’s seeking out Warren has lent credence to many reports that he is seriously considering challenging Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Factors influencing his decision are said to include the potential malfunction of the Clinton campaign in recent weeks over a possible mishandling of classified material, and the wishes of his late son, Beau.

Before he died of cancer in May at age 46, Beau Biden reportedly tried to make his father promise that he would run for president.

Neither would Biden seem a more natural match for Warren – or a smarter play – than Clinton. In his 36 years as a senator, Biden did not make a mark as a scourge of criminality in the financial sector. He also voted for legislation backed by credit-card companies headquartered in his home state of Delaware.

When Biden ran for the Democratic nomination against Clinton in 2008, he came in fifth in the Iowa caucuses and immediately dropped out. She went on to a hard-fought loss to Barack Obama.